I'm wondering if any thought has been given to the voting
system's scalability. Right now it works pretty good, allowing
you to advance to higher levels through a fair amount of
work. However, as more and more users register, the amount
of voting will increase. Is there a maximum number of votes
one node can receive, so that when this site gets really
busy I won't advance 3 levels in one day from a single post? <g>

And is the search box supposed to be showing up inside
the banner ad now, or is it a victim of ilayer experimentation?

I've been wondering the same thing. Look at the Best Nodes list. The nodes with the most votes are the more recent ones, which were posted after more people had voting privlages. (sp?) This is kind of skewed.

Perhaps we could have a quest to come up with a better way of handling post reputations, XP, and ranks.

It only *seems* skewed, because there are two factors which haven't yet reached an upper bound -- the number of regular users of the site, and the number of available votes a good post can receive. As those increase (the second somewhat dependent upon the first), so will the number of points awarded to the best nodes.

It would be nice if voters dug through the archives to find some underappreciated gems (there are a couple of Snippets I'm incredibly proud of, as they're good technical hacks) instead of hitting up the newest ones.

Of course, as the number of votes available to J. Random Regular increases, unless the total number of really good posts (as opposed to mediocre) will have to increase, or he'll vote up posts that are less deserving than before. When you only have five votes per day, and thirty new posts, you'll save your votes for the gems. When you have 25 votes per day and 30 new posts, you can afford to be less discriminating.

Perhaps the act of voting shouldn't grant experience -- and being voted up should grant more.

Maybe there shouldn't be so much encouragement to use all your votes. What actual experience do I get using all of my votes? Maybe we should keep XP for voting, but remove the XP for using all your votes.

I agree with the above poster -- I can see the logic
behind giving out XP for
individual votes. But not for using all your votes.
Effectively, all votes are not equal when this incentive
is in place. Why? Because you have a higher incentive to use
up your last vote then your non-last votes. Not only that, but
last votes are a greater percentage than non-last votes for
newer users -- thus giving newer users
the most incentive to just rate up all the
newest nodes in SoPW in order to get their quick XP fix.

The incentive to vote should remain equal each and
every time a user votes.

I agree with Adam and Neshura. Voting should be primarily
an attempt to grant XP to the author of a well-written and/or
useful post (or, conversely, to inflict penance on a wayward
monk).

I like the incentive to participate in this great site, and
you should continue to give XP to those who vote, but perhaps
on a decreasing scale (The first vote has 25% chance of +1,
but the chance for XP declines for each vote thereafter.)

Russ

P.S. The XP nodelet shows (as I am posting this) that I
have graduated to level 2. Now I'll see what voting is really like... :-)

Why not do it the other way around? As chromatic put it, when you have only 5 votes you treat each of them as if they were gems. Then why not keep them that way? People should be excited to be able to vote in the 1st place. Not only because it gives you XPs, but because its a priviledge. I've noticed that since I made monk, I've increased my XPs A LOT just by the mere voting quantity factor, and sincerely, I think each one of my votes actually is worth less now.

To be able to do a "trusty vote" does it really matter how much XPs you have? Bottom line, I say keep the voting XPs but don't increase the number of votes as you "grow".

nice if voters dug through the archives to find some underappreciated gems

Adding an "Oldies but Goodies" section to the Monastery would help some of these gems resurface. Monks of a specified high level could earn XP by submitting past posts not by themselves. "Gems" would have to be n weeks old, and would be featured for 1 week.

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other